Fossils of a cavewoman named Miss Ples were buried in caves in South Africa, known as the Cradle of Humanity.
Contemporary testing methods show that the first humans began roaming the earth 3.4 to 3.7 million years ago.
This new calendar could reshape knowledge of human evolution.
It also means that there were multiple paths for our ancestors to evolve into early humans.
For years, scientists discovered Australopithecus africanus in the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg.‘He thought it was younger than 2.6 million years.
More early human remains have been found in the cave than anywhere else in the world. This includes the nearly complete skull found in 1947 and nicknamed Miss Ples.
The bipedal species was much shorter compared to modern humans, according to the Smithsonian Museum. The average height of the men was 138 centimeters, and the women’s was 115 centimeters.
However, with new radioactive dating techniques, it was determined that Ms. Ples and the remains found around it were one million years older than previously thought.
Researchers are testing a rare isotope found in the sediment around the fossils, formed in stones exposed to cosmic rays before falling into the cave.
formerly *Australopithecus africanus*‘It was thought that 2.2 million years ago it was too young to evolve into the homo genus, the ancestor of human beings who already roamed the earth.
With these new findings, a million-year gap in the evolutionary process has been filled, and the possibility that Ms. Ples and her species may have been the ancestors of the first humans arose.
As a result, the 3.2 million-year-old found in Africa Australopithecus afarensis Species that lived on earth around the same time as the ape-like Lucy of the genus Lucy were long believed to be the ancestors of early humans.
With this renewed calendar, experts say the two species may have interacted and reproduced, complicating the picture of where humans came from. They also emphasize that we may not have come from a single evolutionary line.
“So our family tree is like a bush,” said French expert Laurent Bruxelles, who participated in the study.